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Learning from Tasty

By Snap Agency August 22, 2017

Case studies are a great way for local businesses to learn more about other successful companies that have implemented digital marketing strategies.

Digital marketing can often seem overwhelming to local businesses because it’s such a large field with so many different tactics. But by focusing on the tactics of another business, you can see their strategies in practice and learn how to implement them in your own company.

What is Tasty?

Tasty is a food channel and subsection of Buzzfeed, one of the largest websites in the world. They create articles and accompanying videos showing you how to cook incredible foods, but also looking at famous chefs and ingredient selection.

Make it Applicable

This channel is a food lover’s heaven. But rather than focusing only on other chefs and professionals, they made the food relevant for the everyday person. Most of the recipes are relatively simple and can be copied at home without any extra equipment.

Although they do create videos about foods that are too complicated for most people to make, the vast majority of their recipes are simple but delicious. This has the effect of making it feel applicable and achievable by the everyday person.

The lesson to learn from this in your own business is to make sure that your content is at the right skill and knowledge level for your potential customers.

Create Content for Social Media

Once you’ve decided which marketing channels you’re going to focus your efforts on you should ensure you’re creating content specifically for those places.

In the case of Tasty, they knew that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would be their main sources of traffic. This meant that they created content in a form that works well on social media.

In their case, they looked at most recipe videos and saw that they were five, ten or even fifteen minutes long, far too long for most social media users.

Instead, they shrunk a single recipe down to under a minute, and this made it easier to consume and more shareable too. However, if you look at their YouTube channel, you’ll see that they have considerably longer videos. The key here is on work to your platform and deliver content in a form that those users want to consume it.

Design a Formula

All of their recipe videos follow the same formula. They are shot from an overhead camera where you can only see the ingredients and the hands of the person making the food.

This helps to depersonalize the chef and make it seem like you at home could do it too. They quickly realized that this formula appealed to their audience and had refused to change it, even when other companies have blatantly copied their work.

What this has done is to create a brand for them, just like when we see a red can of soda our mind thinks Coca Cola, a short, overhead recipe video screams Tasty!

The key here is to be consistent with a formula that works. Whether you’re creating blog posts, graphics or videos, it’s important that you are consistent. Don’t change the image style or colors, stick with what works and make that your brands image.

Focus on Quality

More than any other adjective, the word to describe Tasty would be quality. They didn’t skimp on production; it’s obvious that they are using powerful cameras and are working with some talented editors.

Of course, most local businesses don’t have the same resources as Buzzfeed, but the lesson to take away from this case study is to focus on quality over quantity. When Tasty first started they didn’t produce a massive volume of videos, but what they did make was fantastic and got people in the kitchen, replicating their recipes.

If you can put the customer first and focus on providing them as much value as possible, they’ll be far more likely to purchase from you further down the line.

Listen to Feedback

Finally, make sure that you listen to the feedback that your customers are giving you. Tasty does this by asking their users what recipes they would like to see and then following through on their recommendations.

It’s likely that your customers and potential customers have burning problems that they want to be answered, ask them what they are and then solve them.

Eventually, you’re going to face negative feedback, look at it in a positive light and ask what you can do to fix the problem.

Conclusion

Tasty went from obscurity to one of the most recognizable social media channels in less than a year. Obviously, having financial backing from a larger company is helpful, but it’s not fair to disregard what they’ve done because of this.

There are many lessons to learn from looking at the success of other companies, and for Tasty it’s clear that they won because of a combination of quality, placement, and perfect targeting.